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Chiefs do Tweet

Everyday I talk to many business people and, whilst they usually have a personal Twitter account, they can’t quite see how it could benefit them as a business tool.

So we need a frame for this; a context within which Twittering as a business makes sense.  Wikinomics and the trend towards mass collaboration in business is already upon us. The rules of this game are openness, sharing, socialising (peering) and acting globally. Marketing is moving towards peer to peer generated conversations (pull) rather than the ‘push’ of mass broadcast campaigns. 

Twitter is fuel for the fire of buzz and collaboration around your business or brand.  But to be successful in the world of ‘Business 2.0′  you need to be ready for a culture shock (perhaps): what matters here is openness, authenticity and transparency.  You have to be prepared to be yourself, and show the person behind your company.

Here are some tips on Twittering for business:

1. Embrace the new rules: make sure your Twitter presence (profile, picture etc) and your tweets show your organisation as non-hierarchical, open and authentic and transparent. Tweet regularly and include a mix of business, but keep it informal, and personal, revealing bits about your unique personality. People buy people, especially those they trust; openness, authenticity and transparency build trust.
2. People to people: Be informal, forget hierarchy. Social media breaks all that gumpf down. Show your personal side in your bio; reveal the person (at least have a photo of yourself).
3. Ask and ye shall recieve: It goes without saying that sharing information will increase your popularity. In fact sharing information and forwarding what you know is the new networking according to Harvard Business. All the best business networkers share to get ahead. You can do this on Twitter by retweeting (RT), sharing links (use URL shorteners such as bit.ly, not tinyurl), and advertising your (interesting) blog posts.  But you can also power up your sharing by asking. Ask your followers for advice, input, questions for research – of course, feel free to offer them little rewards in return!
4. Admit your mistakes: all great samurais do this, and all the best leaders in business. If you get it wrong, admit it
5. Get socialising: get to know your followers and socialise with them. Ask them questions and share their information. Use @, RT’s, direct messages (DM) to engage and you will get more out of your Twitter network.

Many CEOs are Twittering. Twitter is micro-blogging and leads to exponential sharing of information and news in no more than 40 characters – what business leader would not be attracted to that!!Check out the following for some good examples:

• Tim O’Reilly - Chief Exec O’Reilly Media
• Christine Perkett - Chief Exec of PerkettPR
• Michael Hyatt - Chief Exec of Thomas Nelson

Other posts you might like:

• Getting Your Head Around Facebook for Business
• Use the Science of Influence to Leverage your Network on Twitter
• 7 Ways to Use Twitter to Power up your Online PR

Conversation is two way.  And the best conversations, those that promote mutual learning and collaboration, can happen in the most unexpected situations. I have the most wonderful and enlightening conversations with the cleaner in our offices.  She is very wise and  I have a deep respect for her!

We already know from the previous posts that productive conversation involves the sharing of our thinking through high quality advocacy. And it involves taking responsibility for truly understanding the other person’s thinking through high quality inquiry. 

Inquiring into how other’s think

High quality inquiry involves seeking others’ views, probing at how they arrived at them and, critically yet hardest of all for most of us, encouraging them to challenge your perspective. This may require us to help them share, or even understand, their own thinking. This involves listening and questioning and sometimes gently challenging them. If you are a coach, you have a head start here!

Find out how others see the situation by asking them to give examples of the ‘data’ they have used and selected in their thinking and in reaching their conclusions.  You will need to help them tell you the steps they have used to get to their thinking. The most useful questions here are the ‘what’ and the ‘how’. 

•  ”What information did you use to reach that conclusion?”
•  ”What are you thinking here?”
• “what do you think about this?”
• “I’m really interested, can you tell me how did you get to that conclusion?”

Be open to challenge

Be open to be challenged on your own conclusions, stay open and curious and remain detached from being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ : recognise that two brains are most always better than one and that true colloboration will promote mutual learning and growth. “I notice that we have differing, opinions on this matter, and I”m really interested in finding out what I am missing that you have noticed.”

Openly ask for help in finding out what you may be missing that they are seeing.  Encourage the other person to identify the gaps or errors in your thinking.  If you maintain a state of high curiosity, this will keep your mind open and the dialogue productive even when you are convinced that you are ‘right’ and they are ‘wrong’.

Inquire into the non verbal language or emotion that the other person may be showing, but do this in a non-confrontational way.  “I notice that you frowned when you looked at that data; are you confused at all?”

And a great tip is to ask for help in exploring whether you are unknowingly contributing to the problem.  This will require you to put ego and arrogance well behind you!  “I get a feeling that something I am doing may be blocking this conversation moving forward, is that something you have noticed too?”

 Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Top tips for good conversations
• Sharing your thinking for high quality advocacy

Productive dialogue is more important now than ever.  With social media and social networks supplementing many of our face to face coversations, learning the ABC of productive conversations can help you leverage your social networks through online media. In this post I continue to look at the components of productive dialogue.

Once you have fully grapsed the idea of the ladder of inference and become a good thinking detective you are ready to leverage the two key tools of productive dialogue; the first one being high quality advocacy.

Advocacy is about sharing your thinking effectively. This could include disclosing how you feel, expressing an opinion, urging a course of action or asking someone to do something. Good ‘thinking detectives’ leverage high quality advocacy so that they are not simply offering opinions or requests. But they actually provide the data on which they based their thinking (rather than interpretations of data) and share how they arrived at their conclusions from the data they used.

Emotional state or ‘frame of mind’ is crucial to this.  Think of the last time when you assumed you were right about something and in dialogue with someone ; perhaps you were having a Twitter conversation or chatting on Facebook. Notice how, in this frame of mind, you are driven to get others to realise what you ‘already know’.   You are trying to influence others to your way of thinking and this feels very one way.  In this type of conversation there is a notable lack of mutual learning. The whole point in having productive conversations is to promote and enforce mutual learning; this is what social networking and social media is brilliant for.  But you have to approach it with the right frame of mind.

Here are some tips about how to maintain the right frame of mind for productive conversations:

1. See every conversation as an opportunity to learn and promote mutual learning
2. Assume you may be missing things others see, and seeing things others miss
3. Stay curious
4. Assume others are acting in ways that make sense to them

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Why productive dialogue is key to accelerating organisational success
• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession

Productive dialogue will accelerate business performance

Good business dialogue cannot be underestimated: it encourages collaboration and creativity and opens up individual and organisational learning and innovation. Dialogue, by definition, is obviously two-way, in that it is between one person and another, but it is also two way in that there is an inner dialogue that has to happen for the overall output to be effective. 

The human brain does not like ambiguity or conflict.  It naturally moves to make a choice: black and white. But often this leads to less effective ’single loop’ learning, Chris Argyris in his various models of double loop learning, including ladder of inference and high advocacy/inquiry, encourages an internal challenge (an inner mental dialogue) to encourage us to constantly challenge the unconscious processes generate the conclusions and short cuts that our normal reasoning makes.

For example, you get into the office early to get on with some work and find your boss already there.  You try to make conversation, yet your boss is surly and abrupt.  You draw conclusions (in NLP this is part of the meta model ‘complex equivalent) about the ‘facts’ at hand – i.e. boss is surly=I have done something wrong. So you spend the rest of the day worrying and trying to figure out what it is that you have or haven’t done. Suddenly, through your interpretations and inferences about your boss’s behaviour, you are working on a different set of ‘facts’ altogether. And, in actual fact, the boss just feels poorly because he or she has a cold coming on; it is nothing to do with you at all.

This is a very simple example but shows how, with lightening speed of reasoning, the brain automatically makes these conclusions that end up running our lives.  Making us less effective and giving us less freedom of choice. So we need to train our brains to hold the ‘deep structure’ of meaning without running away with the wrong conclusions.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” And he has a point.  It is ‘painful’ for our brains to hold different, possibly opposing, ideas about the same fact without jumping to one ‘right’ conclusion.  But by looking closely at the information on which we have built our ‘house of conclusions’ will help us to be more accurate and structured in our thinking and then our dialogues and conversations will be very powerful.

So this requires some detective work.  Much of our thinking is based on the conclusions we have drawn (as part of this automatic and unconscious process). Chris Argyris in his ‘Ladder of Inference’ recksons it goes like this:

1. We have ‘data’ presented to us – statistics, a reaction, words, expression
2. We select the data to use as part of our thinking – a comment, information etc
3. We interpret this data and add meaning to it
4. We draw conclusions from these interpretations – this helps our brain to put a label on what is happening (and boy, do our brains like labels!!), which helps to explain it and propose action from it

This is a ‘pattern’ that we do subconsciously, with lighting speed.  But if we can learn how to slow this process down, break it up and do some detective work so that we use the right data, make sure we have all the data we need and then draw the most useful conclusions, our lives will be so much better!

The other day I had a client say to me: “We need to do more online PR and focus on improving SEO”.  I took this as a criticism that we weren’t doing enough and the client was unhappy.  However, after a couple of days and another conversation I realised that the client was so delighted with what we are doing that they want more of it; and after reading our blog posts they are keen to move into blogging and other social media to improve their online marketing!

Here’s what to do to be a ‘thinking detective’:

1. Put your ‘critic’s’ head on and retrace your thinking steps.  What data did you select? What caught your attention? What are you considering unimportant here?  Quite often we focus our attention on what is wrong rather than what is going well!
2. Then retrace your thinking: how did you interpret the data you selected? What filters did you put on it (i.e. a negative one?)? What assumptions and presuppositions did you make?  i.e. in the example above I assumed the client was unhappy, and I presupposed that we weren’t doing enough online work.  That clouded the rest of my entire thinking processes.

Related posts you may enjoy reading:

• Accelerate your business through conversation
• Communication boosts learning and innovation
• Good communication or 41 years of mistruths?
• How to accelerate behavioural change out of recession